Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli

Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, also written Marsili, was an Italian scholar, natural scientist, soldier and emissary, born in Bologna on 10 July 1658 and died there on 1 November 1730. He studied mathematics, anatomy and natural history, travelled in Asia Minor collecting data on the Ottoman Empire, served the Habsburg army as a military engineer and mapped the long Habsburg and Ottoman border in Hungary. His treatise on the sea, published in 1725, leads him to be counted among the founding fathers of oceanography. He gave his collections to the Senate of Bologna University in 1712 and founded the Institute of Sciences and Arts there, opened in 1715. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Foreign Associate of the Paris Academy of Sciences.